The river is the river

by Buckley, Jonathan;

  As the waiter answers a query from Kate, Naomi regards him, as one would a statue. He is wearing a long tight apron, and a white shirt with a black tie. ‘Surprised they don’t make the poor lad do a French accent,’ she says, when the waiter has left them. The ersatz rusticity of the décor is remarked upon, as is the fragility of the seats: they are folding metal items, with wooden slats; the sort of seats you might find under the plane trees, beside the pétanque area. ‘A few months ago, this thing would have collapsed if I’d sat on it,’ she says, doing a small squirm and smiling as if overjoyed to be able to occupy so delicate a piece of furniture without risk. Reading the menu, she is appalled by the prices, but jovially so. Many things here appal and amuse her: the preserves and condiments on the shelves behind her, positioned with all the labels precisely aligned, like exhibits in a museum of good taste; the fruit displayed in wicker baskets, on beds of straw, as if they were made of blown glass; the huge loaves of artisanal bread, each of which cost more than the waiter earns in an hour, Naomi surmises. She orders a bowl of soup and a glass of fruit juice; the juice, she remarks, is more expensive than wine.

  ‘I’m paying,’ says Kate.

  ‘No, it’s on me,’ says Naomi, with the look that will brook no argument. ‘It’s the least I can do,’ she says, and she raises her sister’s hands to her lips for a kiss. ‘My God,’ she whispers, ‘look at her.’

  An exquisite Japanese girl, a year or two older than Lulu, is sitting at a nearby table, with a boy who must be her boyfriend. The symmetry of her face is unimprovable and her skin is as smooth as a jar; she has a gorgeous little plum of a mouth, by which the boyfriend appears to be transfixed. Her lips are moving, but she does not seem to be speaking; the movement is like that of someone who’s asleep. She is more interested in her phone than in her companion, but he is captivated. Now, stroking the phone, she says something, and her remark makes him smile; she glances at him, as if to check that the smile is there, then resumes her work on the phone. The boyfriend’s gaze grazes her chest. The chest is that of a twelve-year-old boy. But she is wearing an interesting T-shirt: very tight, and bright pink, with writing in the centre, in complicated lettering, Gothic style.

  Naomi, reading the T-shirt, recites: ‘The Dave Breat Intervence – Remember the Ambition’.

  ‘Don’t stare,’ her sister tells her.

  ‘I’m not staring,’ Naomi answers, staring.

  ‘Naomi, you might as well be shoving a camera in their faces.’

  ‘They haven’t noticed. In a world of their own,’ she says, as the waiter delivers the dishes to the young couple’s table. ‘Who’s Dave Breat?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Maybe Lulu will know,’ says Naomi. ‘I thought it said Dave Breast. Which would have been amusing.’

  ‘Please stop gawping.’

  Naomi glances at her sister. ‘And what’s an intervence?’ she asks.

  ‘I haven’t the faintest,’ says Kate, as her sister’s head swivels back. ‘Naomi—’

  ‘Did she just take a picture of her food?’ she asks, in high consternation. ‘I think she did. I think she just took a picture of her salad.’

  ‘I believe she did, yes.’

  The girl is performing a complicated procedure on her phone, at speed, with great concentration. ‘Now she’s uploading it, isn’t she?’ says Naomi. ‘The salad is going online. All over the country, people will soon be looking at those tomatoes.’

  ‘I would not be surprised. Now please stop staring.’

  ‘What’s the point?’ says Naomi. ‘Who wants to see a photo of a salad?’

  ‘I’m sure she has many friends.’

  ‘But a salad?’ she moans.

  ‘It’s all about sharing,’ says Kate. ‘We’re too old to understand. You should see the things that appear on Lulu’s phone.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Last week, a toilet.’ At last her sister’s attention has been secured.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘One of her friends went to a club in Liverpool and had to share the horror of the facilities. She’s had pictures of food as well. Gigantic pizzas, huge ice creams. Funny vegetables. Carrots with willies. That kind of thing.’

  Naomi glances again at the Japanese girl, who is now taking photos of her boyfriend as he eats. ‘God, we’re doomed,’ Naomi sighs, and she presses her face into the bowl of her hands. The extravagance of her despair attracts the attention of the small boy, and his mother, and the mother’s friend. Coming up for air, Naomi makes eye contact with the boy and tries another smile on him, this time with a wave as well, wiggling her fingers so that the rings – four of them on the one hand, each of them bold – perform a little dance for him; he shrinks against his mother’s arm.

  The sisters talk about Lulu; Kate tells her sister about things that occurred during the summer and in the months before, when the sisters were not speaking, and Naomi listens with interest, with concern, with amusement, and neither of them makes any allusion to their argument. At Naomi’s instigation, Martin’s workload is discussed; Naomi is sympathetic to the proposition that most members of the public have absolutely no idea of the amount of preparation that’s required for a day in court. They move on to Kate’s plans for next Easter’s holiday – Lulu has always wanted to go diving, so they are considering Kuredu, in the Maldives. In the past, this topic might have caused some resentment, imperfectly masked, but today there is none, it seems. ‘Sounds great,’ says Naomi. They are talking about Kuredu when Naomi winces, as if the nerve of a tooth has suddenly fired. But it’s not a tooth that’s caused the pain – it’s the noise from the group that has taken over the long table in the middle of the dining room. There are some excitable people in the group, and they keep talking over each other; one of the women is particularly loud and strident. ‘Sounds like she’s strangling kittens,’ says Naomi, hitting the woman with a glance that only behaviour of supreme obnoxiousness would warrant. The woman, not noticing, shrieks again, making Naomi grimace. Her hearing is much more sensitive than it used to be, she tells Kate. Things that never used to be noise are noise to her now, and things that would always have been indisputably noise – ‘Like her’, with another assassinating glance – now cause her pain. ‘We’re going to have to leave,’ she says. Though her sister has not quite finished her dish, Naomi goes up to the counter to pay.

  ‘Shall we go up to the golf course?’ Naomi suggests. It must be five years since they last took that path, a path so steep that Naomi had been forced to stop three or four times before turning back. She tucks a hand under Kate’s arm to steer her in the direction of the hill.

  At the junction the road is being relaid. The red and white barriers; the workmen, two of them, talking; the sunlight in the street; Naomi on her arm – Kate is reminded of another afternoon and an episode of alarm, as sudden as a stroke. Workmen in a trench were looking at her in a way that meant something, Naomi had insisted. They were not workmen, said Naomi, trembling, crushing her sister’s wrist. They were not workmen and they knew something about her, she said. She was crying and could not move.

  But in a moment the memory is broken: the pneumatic drill starts up, and Naomi flinches. ‘God almighty,’ she yells; clamping her hands over her ears, she hurries off. It’s no more then twenty yards to the lane that leads up to the golf course, but she has to pause there for breath. In the crook of the lane, in the lee of the houses, the din is dampened a little. ‘One moment, please,’ she requests. She puts a hand to her chest and smiles, impressed by the speed of her own heartbeat. ‘Like a wheel of feathers whirring in there,’ she announces, then she takes her sister’s arm again. Within a minute the gradient has become arduous, but Naomi strides on, stamping the tarmac as if pushing into the sand of a dune. Soon she is gasping. On the side of the road that’s closer to the cliff, a path begins, on top of the high verge; having scaled the verge, Naomi stops, clutching the wire fence. ‘A brief pause,�
�� she says; which is as much as she can say in a single breath.

  ‘We’ve come far enough,’ says Kate.

  ‘This is where we turned back last time,’ Naomi reminds her. With half a dozen deep and slow draughts, she replenishes her lungs before resuming the ascent.

  A hundred yards on, they halt again. They are far above the town now; from here, the sound of the drill is a purr. Naomi takes it all in, with a gaze that sweeps slowly from the river to the castle and on to the Downs, beyond the houses. Three swans are moving downstream, as bright as pearls on the brown water of the river; Naomi watches them, with concentration, as if it were of supreme importance that she should commit to memory everything that is to be seen here. Craning her neck, leaning forward, she peers over the fence; just a pace or two from her feet, the chalk cliff falls vertically; she has no head for heights, her sister knows; Kate recalls the high bridge over the river in Porto, and Naomi’s fingers clamped on the railings like padlocks, her arms rigid with fright as the traffic shook the bridge’s frame. Now Naomi takes a step back, her mouth agape in operatic terror. ‘Let’s go,’ she announces, hands on hips, offering an arm like a wing. Kate’s hand closes around a bicep; the arm feels like a cricket stump lagged with cotton wool.

  Beyond the golf club, a gate opens out onto the hillside, where a broad track of close-cropped grass rises gently to the horizon. Arm in arm, the sisters amble up the slope. In the distance, silhouetted against the sky, three hikers are moving towards the next summit; these are the only people in sight; sheep are grazing on each side of the track; the rending of grass is the only sound, other than the sound of Naomi’s breathing, which is as loud as a respirator. ‘Let’s stop here for a while,’ she says, sitting down in the midst of knee-high tussocks. Arms outspread like a supplicant, she inhales through her nose, deeply, with deliberation, as if taking a prescribed dosage of the salubrious air. ‘This is glorious,’ she says; this has been a word of hers since she was young – music was often glorious; the heat in Provence was glorious, Kate remembers. Naomi closes her eyes, as though overwhelmed; her smile is blissful.

  Kate gazes across the shallow valley. On the far side, the slope is topped by a crest of trees that resembles smoke; below them, the grass is pleated where the soil has slipped. The grass is bright there; huge cusps of shadow lie in the lee slopes; past the shoulder of the hill, blade-shaped pieces of the river glisten. Taking a notebook from her pocket, Kate writes: river – blades of water – colour: tarnished steel. She replaces the notebook stealthily, so as not to disturb her sister’s apparent reverie. The shadow of a cloud slides up the valley floor and over the top of the hill. As the grass rebrightens, a bird becomes visible against the green: a hawk, teetering on the breeze, on stiff wings. And Kate recalls their father, holding the binoculars to his eyes, as serious as a general inspecting the field of battle. This might have been Glencoe; the bird was a hen harrier, a rarity. Its face is like an owl’s, he explained, passing the binoculars so that Kate could see for herself, but she could not manage to hold the bird within the lenses, and she saw nothing but a flurry of feathers. She pretended she had seen the owlish face, then she handed the binoculars back. For as long as the harrier was in sight, it was not possible to leave the hill. The wind was very strong. She and Naomi and her mother stood side by side, leaning into it, with their arms out; the light, coursing across the heather, made the glen flash like a reef of coral.

  Naomi, pointing, asks: ‘Do you know what that is?’

  ‘A red kite,’ Kate answers. ‘The tail is the giveaway.’ She glances at her sister, and sees a frown that seems to have nothing to do with the hovering bird. ‘I was just thinking of Glencoe,’ she says; a nod is all the response she receives. ‘You remember?’

  ‘I know we went there, but that’s about all.’

  ‘You don’t remember Dad and the harrier?’ She makes binoculars of her hands and raises them to her eyes, clenching her face into a mask of intense vigilance.

  Naomi looks into the grass; she closes her eyes, as if to consult the index of her memory. ‘That wasn’t Glencoe,’ she decides.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Positive,’ says Naomi. ‘Glencoe was a washout. Rained all day. The harrier was Glenfinnan,’ she states.

  To Kate the name brings nothing with it, but it is probable that Naomi is correct.

  ‘We thought we were going to be there all day,’ adds Naomi.

  ‘We did,’ Kate concurs.

  The red kite rises, veering towards the head of the valley; it comes up above the skyline and settles in the air, batting its wings against the wind that’s up there; then down it comes, in a long low arc, to skim the grass of the slope on which the sisters are sitting, coming so close that Kate can see the black dashes on the plumage of its tail. She looks to Naomi, but Naomi is not watching the bird – she is squinting at a part of the sky that has nothing in it, and her lips are moving a little, as if she were reciting something under her breath. Kate waits, observing her sister askance; such distraction has been seen many times.

  The silence is prolonged for a minute more, then Naomi turns, and from the slowness of the turn, and her smile, it is clear that she knows she has been under observation. ‘I’m fine,’ she says, with an affectionate smile.

  ‘You were listening,’ says Kate, as if – she hopes – referring to something like the exercising of a strange and special skill.

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Not just to the breeze.’

  ‘No,’ Naomi confirms; she seems pleased to be legible to her sister. A sheep has approached to within ten yards of her; having given the animal some scrutiny, she says: ‘Mainly to myself. You know how it is. Thinking aloud in my head. The usual soundtrack. Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Thinking about what?’

  ‘This and that. Good things.’

  ‘Bernát?’

  ‘Of course,’ she says, gravely, as if thinking of Bernát were some sort of duty, like thinking of Jesus. She looks skyward and narrows her eyes, giving consideration to something. ‘If you heard his voice,’ she says, but the sentence is unfinished; words, it seems, cannot be found for the voice of Bernát.

  ‘Well, I hope I will,’ Kate responds, but the remark is squandered. She asks: ‘That’s what you were hearing? His voice?’

  ‘I was remembering some things he’d said, yes,’ she says, smiling at her sister.

  ‘And are you hearing him now?’

  ‘No, Katie, I am not hearing him now. It’s OK. I’m not losing the plot.’

  ‘I know, but—’

  ‘Stop fretting. It’s all right. Really. I’m absolutely fine, everything is fine,’ she says, overdoing the soothing. ‘My memory is peculiar, you know that. Our minds don’t work in the same way. I can’t invent things the way you can, but my brain is adhesive. I can play a whole opera in my head. Parsifal, start to finish. And I can play Bernát’s voice, whenever I want to. It’s the same thing,’ she says. She shifts a little to the side, onto a more accommodating patch of turf; then, after checking the turf behind her, she lies back, lowering her head onto a tuft of long grass. She crosses her hands on her chest and gazes into the sky; she smiles as if the empty blue space were a scene of inexhaustible intricacy. ‘This is wonderful. This is really wonderful,’ she murmurs, and she closes her eyes.

  Looking at her sister, Kate begins to see a day in Scotland, a warm day at a loch, and young Naomi drowsing. The name of the loch is unavailable, but she sees it; she presses her palms to her eyes and the scene becomes brighter: the yellow dinghy, water blazing in the sunlight; a small island, with a single small tree; a dark steep slope behind it. Their mother, on the shore, was waving to them, beckoning them back, calling, but barely anything of her voice reached the boat. Naomi withdrew the paddle, and the last ripple ran away without interruption, a very long distance. Kate waved back, and their mother stopped shouting. The loch was silent; its surface was a flawless replica of the sky. The sisters lay in the boat, their legs int
erlocked, their hands touching on the taut hot flanks of the inflatable, heads lolling on the cushion of air. Thirty, forty yards away, the snout of a fish came out of the water and they heard the sound it made. ‘This is glorious,’ Naomi would have said.

  Now Naomi is smiling, as if remembering the same day, but she is listening again, Kate can tell; she is listening to Bernát. ‘Anything you care to share?’ asks Kate.

  ‘By all means,’ answers Naomi. Then for half an hour she talks, with barely a pause, staring into the sky all the while.

  14.

  One evening, Naomi and Bernát were sitting in the garden, on the bench that Bernát had placed in the farthest corner, between the magnolias, the one that Connor had been sitting on. The magnolias were in bloom; the air was cool and still, and some redness remained in the clouds. For a while they sat in silence, enjoying the sky, then they had begun to talk about their families, and Bernát had told her – almost as if he thought he owed her this clarification – that his trip to Brazil had not achieved what he had hoped it would. He had thought it might be possible to bring about an adjustment of his relationship with his brother, of whom he had seen too little in the preceding six or seven years. There had been no great falling-out, but a slow and inexorable ‘erosion of sympathy’, said Bernát, says Naomi.

  His brother’s marriage to Melissa had been the major cause of this separation, he said. According to Bernát, Melissa was a good-looking but unimaginative and selfish woman. He could never understand why his brother had fallen for her; he could only speculate that it had something to do with sex; her body was undeniably potent, said Bernát. Melissa worked in Human Resources, Naomi explains, as if this were an absurdity in itself. When her path crossed Oszkár’s she was taking a break between jobs, having left a company that had not granted her the promotion that she believed to have been her entitlement. They met in Corsica, in a diving centre in Bonifacio; Melissa was twenty-three and already divorced; Oszkár, though ten years older, had never yet been in danger of marriage. Both were on holiday, though for Oszkár a holiday was never entirely without an element of research; later, this would be a cause of some friction between himself and his wife. They dived together. It must be assumed, said Bernát, that Melissa was seduced by Oszkár’s knowledge of the submarine wildlife; maybe Oszkár had an air of incipient eminence, and Melissa imagined that life with an eminent marine biologist would entail plentiful weeks in the Caribbean and other exotic locales, and long sabbaticals, and the occasional posting to some luxurious Californian institution of scientific endeavour; who knows?